Dave Leitao: A Sports Leader Who Has It In Perspective

Jul. 24, 2008

Society sometimes puts too much emphasis on entertainment figures, especially as it relates to their undeserved celebrity status and personal lives. This is includes sports. Sadder still is that the 24-hour sports television, radio, print and Internet media has ensnared college athletes into the same celebrity trap. "Big-time" schools and conferences make a mockery of their mission of higher education, where recruiting farm teams for the pros and earning millions for huge stadiums and athletes-only facilities dwarf the importance of recruiting Rhodes Scholars or Nobel professors.

Unfortunately, this spring and summer have seen an almost daily list of multiple criminal activity from student-athletes at these powerhouse sports colleges. Coaches aren't exempt either. Some barely rise above the absurdity of their self-absorption. (Perhaps no one is more important or more influential in an 18-year-old athlete's life — away from home for the first time, with the added pressures of the campus and media spotlight — than his coach.) Those in sports who do rise far above the manipulative, win-at-all-costs, career-ladder mentality are noteworthy, especially coaches. Sports cannot reach its true fulfillment without the accompanying life lessons that an adult can give the youth in his charge, a responsibility too many in athletic authority ignore.

"I think, to a man, we all left saying we'd happily go back again," Leitao said. "Whether I do or not, only time will tell. But it's something that affected all of us."

More insights from Coach Leitao are here, at a journal he kept during his visits. Unlike the coach who, a few years ago, left one big-time college program's big bucks for a huge program and its megabucks, and didn't even tell his players "goodbye" — despite the fact he convinced them to trust their college years to him only to desert them — the ennobling side of sports leadership (and pop culture in general) isn't profiled more often. If it did, perhaps it would send the positive messages so urgently needed, not only to sports fans in general, who take things much too seriously on occasion, but to people within the profession as well as to the public at large.